Martin Hans Boyč was the son of the chemist/superintendent of the Royal
Porcelain Manufactory in Copenhagen. He attended the University of
Copenhagen and the Polytechnic School in Denmark before emigrating to
the United States in 1836. The next year, he was assistant geologist and
chemist in the geological surveyor the anthracite coal regions along the
Kiskiminetas and Allegheny rivers and Beaver Creek. He spent most of his
working life in the Philadelphia area. He served assistant to Robert
Hare in the laboratory at 9th and Chestnut Sts. and at the State
Laboratories at 208 Chestnut Street, and was a lifelong friend of
chemist James Curtis Booth.

He was the subject of some early
daguerreotype portraits made in Philadelphia by Robert Cornelius
(1840-1843), now in the collection of the George Eastman House. In 1844,
he received an MD degree from the University of Pennsylvania. His
graduate thesis was "the Structure of the Nervous System." Boyč
preferred the field of chemistry, but he was equally at home in geology
and physics. In 1847, he invented a process of refining cottonseed oil
which he later manufactured on a large scale to be used as a cooking oil
as as an ingredient in toilet soap.

Other researches included
development of perchloric ether used as a smokeless gunpowder, analysis
of feldspar, a treatise on the composition of water in the Schuykill
River, an analysis of concretion from a horse's stomach, analysis of
Chinese artificially colored tea, and an investigation of the Aurora
Borealis. In 1851, he was Chair of Chemistry in Central High,
Philadelphia, but resigned in 1859 because of poor health. He was a
member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Society of
Geologists and he published widely on scientific, medical and literary
topics.

References:

Smith, Edgar F. Martin Hans Boyč, Chemist Philadelphia, 1924

Stapp, William F. Robert Cornelius: Portraits From the Dawn of
Photography Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983